Category Archives: 5G

What is the Purpose of Asymptotic Analysis?

Since its inception, Massive MIMO has been strongly connected with asymptotic analysis. Marzetta’s seminal paper featured an unlimited number of base station antennas. Many of the succeeding papers considered a finite number of antennas, M, and then analyzed the performance in the limit where M\to\infty. Massive MIMO is so tightly connected with asymptotic analysis that reviewers question whether a paper is actually about Massive MIMO if it does not contain an asymptotic part – this has happened to me repeatedly.

Have you reflected over what the purpose of asymptotic analysis is? The goal is not that we should design and deploy wireless networks with a nearly infinite number of antennas. Firstly, it is physically impossible to do that in a finite-sized world, irrespective of whether you let the array aperture grow or pack the antennas more densely. Secondly, the conventional channel models break down, since you will eventually receive more power than you transmitted. Thirdly, the technology will neither be cost nor energy efficient, since the cost/energy grows linearly with M, while the delivered system performance either approaches a finite limit or grows logarithmically with M.

It is important not to overemphasize the implications of asymptotic results. Consider the popular power-scaling law which says that one can use the array gain of Massive MIMO to reduce the transmit power as 1/\sqrt{M} and still approach a non-zero asymptotic rate limit. This type of scaling law has been derived for many different scenarios in different papers. The practical implication is that you can reduce the transmit power as you add more antennas, but the asymptotic scaling law does not prescribe how much you should reduce the power when going from, say, 40 to 400 antennas. It all depends on which rates you want to deliver to your users.

The figure below shows the transmit power in a scenario where we start with 1 W for a single-antenna transmitter and then follow the asymptotic power-scaling law as the number of antennas increases. With M=100 antennas, the transmit power per antenna is just 1 mW, which is unnecessarily low given the fact that the circuits in the corresponding transceiver chain will consume much more power. By using higher transmit power than 1 mW per antenna, we can deliver higher rates to the users, while barely effecting the total power of the base station.

Reducing the transmit power per antenna to 1 mW, or smaller, makes little practical sense, since the transceiver chain will consume much more power irrespective of the transmit power.

Similarly, there is a hardware-scaling law which says that one can increase the error vector magnitude (EVM) proportionally to M^{1/4} and approach a non-zero asymptotic rate limit. The practical implication is that Massive MIMO systems can use simpler hardware components (that cause more distortion) than conventional systems, since there is a lower sensitivity to distortion. This is the foundation on which the recent works on low-bit ADC resolutions builds (see this paper and references therein).

Even the importance of the coherent interference, caused by pilot contamination, is easily overemphasized if one only considers the asymptotic behavior.  For example, the finite rate limit that appears when communicating over i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio or zero-forcing processing is only approached in practice if one has around one million antennas.

In my opinion, the purpose of asymptotic analysis is not to understand the asymptotic behaviors themselves, but what the asymptotics can tell us about the performance at practical number of antennas. Here are some usages that I think are particularly sound:

  • Determine what is the asymptotically optimal transmission scheme and then evaluate how it performs in a practical system.
  • Derive large-scale approximations of the rates that are reasonable tight also at practical number of antennas. One can use these approximations to determine which factors that have a dominant impact on the rate or to get a tractable way to optimize system performance (e.g., by transmit power allocation).
  • Determine how far from the asymptotically achievable performance a practical system is.
  • Determine if we can deliver any given user rates by simply deploying enough antennas, or if the system is fundamentally interference limited.
  • Simplify the signal processing by utilizing properties such as channel hardening and favorable propagation. These phenomena can be observed already at 100 antennas, although you will never get a fully deterministic channel or zero inter-user interference in practice.

Some form of Massive MIMO will appear in 5G, but to get a well-designed system we need to focus more on demonstrating and optimizing the performance in practical scenarios (e.g., the key 5G use cases) and less on pure asymptotic analysis.

Massive MIMO at 60 GHz vs. 2 GHz: How Many More Antennas?

The Brooklyn summit last week was a great event. I gave a talk (here are the slides) comparing MIMO at “PCS” (2 GHz) and mmWave (60 GHz) in line-of-sight. There are two punchlines: first, scientifically, while a link budget calculation might predict that 128.000 mmWave antennas are needed to match up the performance of 128-antenna PCS MIMO, there is a countervailing effect in that increasing the number of antennas improves channel orthogonality so that only 10.000 antennas are required. Second, practically, although 10.000 is a lot less than 128.000, it is still a very large number! Here is a writeup with some more detail on the comparison.

I also touched the (for sub-5 GHz bands somewhat controversial) topic of hybrid beamforming, and whether that would reduce the required amount of hardware.

A question from the audience was whether the use of antennas with larger physical aperture (i.e., intrinsic directivity) would change the conclusions. The answer is no: the use of directional antennas is more or less equivalent to sectorization. The problem is that to exploit the intrinsic gain, the antennas must a priori point “in the right direction”. Hence, in the array, only a subset of the antennas will be useful when serving a particular terminal. This impacts both the channel gain (reduced effective aperture) and orthogonality (see, e.g, Figure 7.5 in this book).

There was also a stimulating panel discussion afterwards. One question discussed in the panel concerned the necessity, or desirability, of using multiple terminal antennas at mmWave. Looking only at the link budget, base station antennas could be traded against terminal antennas – however, that argument neglects the inevitably lost orthogonality, and furthermore it is not obvious how beam-finding/tracking algorithms will perform (millisecond coherence time at pedestrian speeds!). Also, obviously, the comparison I presented is extremely simplistic – to begin with, the line-of-sight scenario is extremely favorable for mmWaves (blocking problems), but also, I entirely neglected polarization losses. Solely any attempts to compensate for these problems are likely to require multiple terminal antennas.

Other topics touched in the panel were the viability of Massive MIMO implementations. Perhaps the most important comment in this context made was by Ian Wong of National Instruments: “In the past year, we’ve actually shown that [massive MIMO] works in reality … To me, the biggest development is that the skeptics are being quiet.” (Read more about that here.)

Book Review: The 5G Myth

The 5G Myth is the provocative title of a recent book by William Webb, CEO of Weightless SIG, a standard body for IoT/M2M technology. In this book, the author tells a compelling story of a stagnating market for cellular communications, where the customers are generally satisfied with the data rates delivered by the 4G networks. The revenue growth for the mobile network operators (MNOs) is relatively low and also in decay, since the current services are so good that the customers are unwilling to pay more for improved service quality. Although many new wireless services have materialized over the past decade (e.g., video streaming, social networks, video calls, mobile payment, and location-based services), the MNOs have failed to take the leading role in any of them. Instead, the customers make use of external services (e.g., Youtube, Facebook, Skype, Apple Pay, and Google Maps) and only pay the MNOs to deliver the data bits.

The author argues that, under these circumstances, the MNOs have little to gain from investing in 5G technology. Most customers are not asking for any of the envisaged 5G services and will not be inclined to pay extra for them. Webb even compares the situation with the prisoner’s dilemma: the MNOs would benefit the most from not investing in 5G, but they will anyway make investments to avoid a situation where customers switch to a competitor that has invested in 5G. The picture that Webb paints of 5G is rather pessimistic compared to a recent McKinsey report, where the more cost-efficient network operation is described as a key reason for MNOs to invest in 5G.

The author provides a refreshing description of the market for cellular communications, which is important in a time when the research community focuses more on broad 5G visions than on the customers’ actual needs. The book is thus a recommended read for 5G researchers, since we should all ask ourselves if we are developing a technology that tackles the right unsolved problems.

Webb does not only criticize the economic incentives for 5G deployment, but also the 5G visions and technologies in general. The claims are in many cases reasonable; for example, Webb accurately points out that most of the 5G performance goals are overly optimistic and probably only required by a tiny fraction of the user base. He also accurately points out that some “5G applications” already have a wireless solution (e.g., indoor IoT devices connected over WiFi) or should preferably be wired (e.g., ultra-reliable low-latency applications such as remote surgery).

However, it is also in this part of the book that the argumentation sometimes falls short. For example, Webb extrapolates a recent drop in traffic growth to claim that the global traffic volume will reach a plateau in 2027. It is plausible that the traffic growth rate will reduce as a larger and larger fraction of the global population gets access to wireless high-speed connections. But one should bear in mind that we have witnessed an exponential growth in wireless communication traffic for the past century (known as Cooper’s law), so this trend can just as well continue for a few more decades, potentially at a lower growth rate than in the past decade.

Webb also provides a misleading description of multiuser MIMO by claiming that 1) the antenna arrays would be unreasonable large at cellular frequencies and 2) the beamforming requires complicated angular beam-steering. These are two of the myths that we dispelled in the paper “Massive MIMO: Ten myths and one grand question” last year. In fact, testbeds have demonstrated that massive multiuser MIMO is feasible in lower frequency bands, and particularly useful to improve the spectral efficiency through coherent beamforming and spatial multiplexing of users. Reciprocity-based beamforming is a solution for mobile and cell-edge users, for which angular beam-steering indeed is inefficient.

The book is not as pessimistic about the future as it might seem from this review. Webb provides an alternative vision for future wireless communications, where consistent connectivity rather than higher peak rates is the main focus. This coincides with one of the 5G performance goals (i.e., 50 Mbit/s everywhere), but Webb advocates an extensive government-supported deployment of WiFi instead of 5G technology. The use WiFi is not a bad idea; I personally consume relatively little cellular data since WiFi is available at home, at work, and at many public locations in Sweden. However, the cellular services are necessary to realize the dream of consistent connectivity, particularly outdoors and when in motion. This is where a 5G cellular technology that delivers better coverage and higher data rates at the cell edge is highly desirable. Reciprocity-based Massive MIMO seems to be the solution that can deliver this, thus Webb would have had a stronger case if this technology was properly integrated into his vision.

In summary, the combination of 5G Massive MIMO for wide-area coverage and WiFi for local-area coverage might be the way to truly deliver consistent connectivity.

Real-Time Massive MIMO DSP at 50 milliWatt

Colleagues at Lund University presented last month a working circuit that performs, in real time, zero-forcing decoding and precoding of 8 simultaneous terminals with 128 base station antennas, over a 20 MHz bandwidth at a power consumption of about 50 milliWatt.

Impressive, and important.

Granted, this number does not include the complexity of FFTs, sampling rate conversions, and several other (non-insignificant) tasks; however, it does include the bulk of the “Massive-MIMO”-specific digital processing. The design exploits a number of tricks and Massive-MIMO specific properties: diagonal dominance of the channel Gramian, in particular, in sufficiently favorable propagation.

When I started work on Massive MIMO in 2009, the common view held was that the technology would be infeasible because of computational complexity. Particularly, the sheer idea of performing zero-forcing processing in real time was met with, if not ridicule, extreme skepticism. We quickly realized, however, that a reasonable DSP implementation would require no more than some ten Watt. While that is a small number in itself, it turned out to be an overestimate by orders of magnitude!

I spoke with some of the lead inventors of the chip, to learn more about its design. First, the architectures for decoding and for precoding differ a bit. While there is no fundamental reason for why this has to be so, one motivation is the possible use of nonlinear detectors on uplink. (The need for such detectors, for most “typical” cellular Massive MIMO deployments, is not clear – but that is another story.)

Second, and more importantly, the scalability of the design is not clear. While the complexity of the matrix operations themselves scale fast with the dimension, the precision in the arithmetics may have to be increased as well – resulting in a much-faster-than-cubically overall complexity scaling. Since Massive MIMO operates at its best when multiplexing to many tens of terminals (or even thousands, in some applications), significant challenges remain for the future. That is good news for circuit engineers, algorithm designers, and communications theoreticians alike. The next ten years will be exciting.

How Much Performance is Lost by FDD Operation?

There has been a long-standing debate on the relative performance between reciprocity-based (TDD) Massive MIMO and that of FDD solutions based on grid-of-beams, or hybrid beamforming architectures. The matter was, for example, the subject of a heated debate in the 2015 Globecom industry panel “Massive MIMO vs FD-MIMO: Defining the next generation of MIMO in 5G” where on the one hand, the commercial arguments for grid-of-beams solutions were clear, but on the other hand, their real potential for high-performance spatial multiplexing was strongly contested.

While it is known that grid-of-beams solutions perform poorly in isotropic scattering, no prior experimental results are known. This new paper:

Massive MIMO Performance—TDD Versus FDD: What Do Measurements Say?

answers this performance question through the analysis of real Massive MIMO channel measurement data obtained at the 2.6 GHz band. Except for in certain line-of-sight (LOS) environments, the original reciprocity-based TDD Massive MIMO represents the only effective implementation of Massive MIMO at the frequency bands under consideration.

More Demanding Massive MIMO Trials Using the Bristol Testbed

Last year, the 128-antenna Massive MIMO testbed at University of Bristol was used to set world records in per-cell spectral efficiency. Those measurements were conducted in a controlled indoor environment, but demonstrated that the theoretical gains of the technology are also practically achievable—at least in simple propagation scenarios.

The Bristol team has now worked with British Telecom and conducted trials at their site in Adastral Park, Suffolk, in more demanding user scenarios. In the indoor exhibition hall trial,  24 user streams were multiplexed over a 20 MHz bandwidth, resulting in a sum rate of 2 Gbit/s or a spectral efficiency of 100 bit/s/Hz/cell.

Several outdoor experiments were also conducted, which included user mobility. We are looking forward to see more details on these experiments, but in the meantime one can have a look at the following video:

Update: We have corrected the bandwidth number in this post.

Summer School on Signal Processing for 5G

If you want to learn about signal processing foundations for Massive MIMO and mmWave communications, you should attend the

2017 Joint IEEE SPS and EURASIP Summer School on Signal Processing for 5G

Signal processing is at the core of the emerging fifth generation (5G) cellular communication systems, which will bring revolutionary changes to the physical layer. Unlike other 5G events, the objective of this summer school is to teach the main physical-layer techniques for 5G from a signal-processing perspective. The lectures will provide a background on the 5G wireless communication concepts and their formulation from a signal processing perspective. Emphasis will be placed on showing specifically how cutting-edge signal processing techniques can and will be applied to 5G. Keynote speeches by leading researchers from Ericsson, Huawei, China Mobile, and Volvo complement the technical lectures.

The summer school covers the following specific topics:

  • Massive MIMO communication in TDD and FDD
  • mmWave communications and compressed sensing
  • mmWave positioning
  • Wireless access for massive machine-type communications

The school takes place in Gothenburg, Sweden, from May 29th to June 1st, in the week after ICC in Paris.

This event belongs to the successful series of IEEE SPS and EURASIP Seasonal Schools in Signal Processing. The 2017 edition is jointly organized by Chalmers University of Technology, Linköping University, The University of Texas at Austin, Aalborg University and the University of Vigo.

Registration is now open. A limited number of student travel grants will be available.

For more information and detailed program, see: http://www.sp-for-5g.com/